Internships Negatively Impacted By COVID-19 According To SWE
As an undergrad, I benefited from being a member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). The organization afforded me great networking and leadership opportunities. In my role at Couragion, I was honored when several members from the SWE Rocky Mountain chapter volunteered to serve as role models in our app. And, I have enjoyed giving back to the organization by volunteering at their GESTEM event and serving as a keynote speaker at the Rocky Mountain chapter’s Spring Summit.
I also follow SWE’s research. The national chapter recently published a report entitled “Impact of COVID-19 on Women in Engineering and Technology”. The report included data from college students who shared their experience with 2020 internship and job offers. SWE found that 32% of students who received a summer job offer had the offer rescinded or postponed and 24% of students who graduated in Spring 2020 had their fulltime job offers rescinded or postponed. These percentages are discouraging – especially since the jobs are in the engineering and technology sectors which typically demonstrate high demand for job candidates.
Given how important internships are for students, such trends are devastating for our incoming workforce. As I shared in my blog last month, internships help boost students’ ability to obtain a job and also increase their starting salaries. So, we as employers need to find creative ways to continue our internship offerings in spite of the challenges posed by COVID-19 and the economic downturn. For example, this summer we hosted an extern from the 2020 STEMpath program. The externship looked different, as there was no ‘in-person’ component this year. However, I think both our extern and our company still gained considerable value from the experience. We followed some best practices which our CEO shared in a blog post at the start of the summer. These tips may be helpful for other companies looking to adapt their internship programs – or similar offerings such as externships, apprenticeships and co-ops.
How have you successfully adapted your student employment programs in light of COVID-19 and the economic downturn? We’d appreciate hearing your best practices on Twitter (@couragion).
